Rants and raves about the mess of higher education in the United States.

Friday, February 10, 2017

Anti-Communists Not Allowed On Campus

By Professor Doom

It’s weird how
much my opinions have changed these last few years, regarding higher education.
My own personal experiences caused me to focus on the corruption and
incompetence but I must admit, when looking at the big picture, that likely
there’s more to the unending debasement of higher education than “merely” great
quantities of corruption and incompetence.

In addition to the corruption and
incompetence, there seems to be a weird bias against conservatism, or a strong
Left bias, if you prefer. The latest demonstration of the extremity is
simply…stunning.

Universities have
no problem in formally
recognizing Satanist student organizations (weirdly, I thought I’d
already written about this, but can’t find it on my blog already), even when
those organizations indicate that their purpose is to make trouble for those
who don’t agree with them:

“The
newsletter mocks conservatives as bigots and groups them among necromancers in
an article titled, “6 Reasons why Necromancy is Better than Bigotry.”

--anyone
else getting tired of labeling like this?

Perhaps the group
isn’t taking their Satanism seriously, and perhaps admin is just showing how
open-minded they are…I still think it’s a bad idea, but I (reluctantly) give
the benefit of the doubt to a Satanist group working on campus.

So what student
groups are not welcome on campus? If Satanists are welcome, the standards must
be pretty low, right?

I’m stunned. It
seems like it was just a generation ago that “hating commies” was perfectly
socially acceptable, and now there’s no space for it on campus. What reason for
denying these students official recognition on campus? It must be pretty
serious if calling conservatives bigots and comparing them to people who cavort
with rotting corpses doesn’t rate a ban, right? Not really:

Specifically, faculty
members objected to a statement in the group's founding document, the Sharon
Statement, declaring that communism is the greatest threat to individual
liberties.

Gee, whiz,
that’s…terrible? Lots and lots of folks died under communism (more accurately,
starvation due to communist policies, but bear with me)…is it so great a
stretch to believe that death can put a real hamper on a person’s individual
liberties? Perhaps this is an extremist view, but the Young Americans for
Freedom aren’t attacking people, they’re attacking an economic and political
system.

I don’t understand
the confusion of ideas that leads to “SATANISTS = GOOD, ANTI-COMMUNISTS = BAD,”
but let’s see if there’s more to the story:

“…YAF’s
founding document, the Sharon Statement…the professors interpreted as ‘not being kind to
those who had a communist background.’”

A reading of the
Statement, from 1960, doesn’t seem to attack (or otherwise is “not being kind”)
the unfortunates who had a communist background. Perhaps I’m being
condescending by calling them “unfortunates,” but everywhere there has been
communism, there have been people willing to risk death to escape it.

There was a time when
people dying trying to cross the Berlin Wall was regular enough, when people
building rickety boats to escape Cuba was a seasonal event. Perhaps that was in
the past, but when we interview people who escaped the communist utopias of
North Korea or whatever, they consistently indicate being happy to escape.

On the other hand,
it’s fairly rare for people to build boats, tunnel under barbed wire, or risk
machine gun fire to escape from non-communist societies into communist
countries. Has anyone risked death to escape a capitalist country, ever? In an era where "we are tolerant of everything because everything is equal" this is a strange lapse in behavior, but I digress.

But I don’t see the
YAF, or anyone else, as unkind to the victims of communism, and there’s nothing
in that Statement to such an effect.

This isn’t an
outright rejection, to be sure, the university will reconsider the application,
with a string attached:

A
university spokesman, however, disputed the characterization of the Faculty
Senate’s decision as a rejection of the club, saying the request had merely
been “deferred” until the students could satisfy school officials that they
will treat classmates, even communists, with respect.

This little
rejection is minor news, I admit…but it’s one more piece of evidence that there
may be more going on that can be explained by corruption and incompetence. One
comment really sums up the situation: